


A Simple Calculation

by illhousen



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-22
Updated: 2014-10-22
Packaged: 2018-02-22 05:09:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2495639
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illhousen/pseuds/illhousen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An achronological collection of scenes from life of Lily Potter, who happened to be a cold-blooded killer dedicated to saving people by killing other people in this work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

No matter how simple a calculation is, there is always a possibility of mistake. Humans are imperfect, the attention can slip, plus accidentally changed to minus resulting in answer turning negative.

Lily Potter has committed two such mistakes.

The first was to trust Peter Pettigrew. She knew he was a coward, of course. She has studied him for long enough to notice how he always evaded troubles, always put James or Sirius or Remus between himself and danger while not looking like he did it for a casual observer.

She respected him for that. In this world of high magic and cheap life, being a coward was sensible.

She thought he was their coward, however. She thought he threw his lot with the Order and his friends. Their victory should be his victory as well.

She was wrong.

The second mistake was to kill Peter Pettigrew. He was not a threat to anyone in the foreseeable future. He could not go to the remaining Death Eaters for protection. Most of them, she suspected, didn't know about his role in the recent events. Those who knew wold blame him for the death of the adversary.

Some would be interested in the remaining secrets in his possession, of course. But they will be too busy dealing with the sudden death of their leader, reorganizing or trying to lay low. Not the best time for bargains, especially since they were more likely to simply torture him for information.

As for the Order or the Ministry... One word from her could've made him a criminal. One word from her could've ended him without taking his life.

She could've certainly end him without taking the lives of a dozen muggles.

Yet, she didn't.

When you realize that you've made a mistake, it is helpful to retrace your steps to find its source.

She decided to start with the war.

She remembered the first time she participated in a battle. Precise wand movements she perfected over long months of practice suddenly becoming clumsy, thoughts refusing to form the words of power forming instead one sentence repeated over and over: "I am going to die."

She has overcome it.

She remembered the first time she killed a person. She was bleeding, her body was tearing apart under conflicting curses, and the next spell from the enemy, she knew, was likely to be her end. She didn't realize what she did at first until a body hit the ground, mask falling aside to reveal unblinking eyes staring not at her but through her. She thought she vomited after that, but the memory was blurred.

She knew how to kill now.

She remembered the first time she lost a friend. Her name was Jane, and they were inseparable in Hogwarts. Jane always knew how to make her laught, how to drag her away from studies and responsibilities and have some fun. Jane knew a lot of secret passages in school and wished to be an architect. Jane was a horrible gossip. Jane held onto petty grudges and executed equally petty revenges, but easily forgave serious offenses if she received an apology and judged the offender sincere enough. Jane was, in a word, alive.

'Was' being a key word here.

Jane's death was a harsh, but perhaps needed lesson: she could not save everyone. People died in wars, by definition. Often good people, sometimes even innocent, not truly involved in the conflict.

Absolute salvation is impossible. The logical curse of action, therefore, was to run damage control. Minimize casualties. Save as many people as was possible.

She thought she was dedicated to that path. A dozen of dead muggles said otherwise.

She tried to conjure the next memory, but the image of Jane falling dead lingered in her mind. She remembered what she felt then, before her revelations. Anger, directed at the enemy, sense of betrayal, directed at the world at large, fear that Jane was just the first to go, hollowness inside which she couldn't fill for a long time and maybe didn't fill yet.

She felt what she was feeling now.

That was her answer. Even though she knew that sometimes the most effective way to save people was to kill some of them, she refused to do it. She was afraid of what James would feel. She was afraid that Harry would be afraid of her. She was afraid that Dumbledore would be disappointed at her. She was afraid that other people would despise her.

More than that, however, she was afraid of what she could become.

Anger. Fear. Self-loathing.

Emotions were clouding her judgment.

For as long as she was human, for as long as she allowed love to her son or respect to her leader to affect her thoughts, she could not perform the calculations flawlessly.

She will need to reforge herself. People would try to stop her. People would try to comfort her, to draw her back into their world.

So, she had to go away from them. That meant leaving Harry behind. But regret and fear she felt over this decisions were just more emotions she had to get rid off.

He will be placed with Petunia. Petunia and her husband will be able to take care of him, and she will provide them with additional protections.

She knew she would not be able to cast Harry away completely. It was a weakness, but one she could work around. So, she will return once she turned herself into what the world needed her to be.

She will turn herself into a machine.

She will cast her mind in steel.


	2. Chapter 2

Speak what you want about wizards, they weren't stupid. Lacking in common sense, according to some, but certainly not stupid.

It was easy to get into the Ministry, true: a lot of people had business there every day. Getting to higher-ups, however, required increasingly difficult security checks.

As usual in such situations, human nature provided the solution.

It was customary for high ranking Ministry official to have their personal Floo network nodes. It provided a simple comfort of being able to go directly to work from home instead of going with the usual morning crowd. Their homes, of course, were guarded as well by powerful charms and a few aurors always on duty.

While the possibility of one of those higher ups turning traitor and smuggling Death Eaters right into the Ministry was brought up a few times during the last war, the comfort and symbol of status the system provided always won over such concerns.

Either way, for an outsider to breach the Ministry security was almost impossible.

Normally.

With the Undersecretary occupying herself in Hogwarts for the year, the security of her home was deemed a low priority by people responsible for maintaining it. It helped that the Undersecretary was not exactly liked.

Aurors preferred to spend their hours somewhere warm, away from the rain. Charms started to show first signs of decay. Enough for her to slip in.

That was the hardest part of her job, and it still left her with little under an hour before the polyjuice potion which transformed her into some random muggle will run out. She was wearing a thick robe and mask, of course, but it never harmed to be careful.

Once she was behind the defensive lines, it was a simple matter to navigate her way to the Minister's office.

The office was tastefully decorated and projected an aura of authority the man occupying it did not posses.

Minister Fudge, hearing the door opened, raised his eyes from papers on his table.

"Who," he started to say.

"Avada Kedavra," she said. The man dropped dead, the look of surprise still on his face.

Dumbledore once said that using the Killing Curse damages the soul of a caster. She didn't believe it. By the time she started using the Unforgivables, she felt nothing at all seeing their effects. It there was a soul to shred, hers was in pieces for a long time.

"Morsmorde." She flicked her wand, a spell learned long ago just for such situations.

It was a simple calculation: one life to say hundreds or thousands. Fudge was denying Voldemort's return. His death was an easy way to both get rid of an incompetent leader and convince the public that the war is coming. Some would blame an imposer or even Dumbledore, saying he did exactly what she did. It didn't matter. She trusted Dumbledore enough to prepare his Order with or without the Ministry's support. And whether or not the public believed that Voldemort is truly back, they could not ignore the assassination of the Minister and the Dark Mark lighting in the sky.

Voldemort will reveal himself sooner or later, and the Ministry will be ready to take action.

If not, another prompting may be needed.


	3. Chapter 3

The morning light found its way to Lily's eyes and she hissed in agony. She thought briefly if it would take less effort to cast a spell to dim the light in the room or to fix the thin line between two curtains manually. In the end she decided that the strain either option would put on her was not worth the results and opted to move her head slightly to the back and put a pillow on top. Even that much activity caused the already barely tolerable migraine to increase in intensity.

Lily whimpered quietly and left her thoughts drift in a desperate attempt to distract herself from her current predicament.

She hated fighting. As far as she was concerned, a job well done consisted of ninety nine percent of information gathering and preparations and one percent of explosions or a bullet to the chest of her target from a mile distance, depending on what option was optimal at the time. Having to get close and personal meant that something has gone wrong: either the target was too well protected for her to deal efficiently, they managed to notice her or the time limit was imposed on her by circumstances.

In either case, she could expect all kinds of nasty surprises waiting for her. A rare target was willing to part with life without exhausting every option available first. While Lily herself didn't believe that the next grand adventure her old headmaster was so fond of speaking about was anything to look forward to, she wished more people did. That would make her task so much easier to carry.

Instead she had to rely on her own supply of nasty surprises.

Occlumency was known - for those who knew about the subject at all - as an art of protecting one's mind, but it was so much more than that. Simply put, Occlumency allowed its users to completely change any aspects of their minds without limitation. Most, however, did use it only to protect the consistency of their thoughts and to hide them from people capable of intruding minds of others.

The reason for that was simple: there was no safe spot to observe the alterations. Any changes to one's mind were experienced in real time, and the long term consequences were hard to predict. The loss of control over the process was likely and sometimes, depending on the changes in question, inevitable.

In other words, the extensive use of Occlumency for anything but simple protection led to madness.

Lily still remembered the cautionary tale passed on her by her late mentor in the art. A tale about Augusta Holloway, an aspiring dark witch from seventeenth century who searched for a way to transcend human nature and eliminate all of her weaknesses. She started with the physical and managed to craft a perfect unchanging body for herself after decades of research. Her athletic prowess was apparently above what people could ever achieve, she was never sick, didn't age and possessed a magic resistance which limits remained untested during her activity. Then she moved to mental. Occlumency was a logical discipline for her to learn, and she used it to cut away her remorse. Then she cut away her fear and anger, and attachments, and desires. She continued, cutting away more and more of what she perceived as weaknesses until there was nothing left of her mind but a sense of purpose. That was the last thing she cut away, fulfilling her path.

She was supposedly still alive, locked away in the Department of Mysteries where she allowed herself to be pocked and probed by the unspeakables because she didn't care - had no capacity to care - what was done to her.

Holloway was not the only one contributing to the extreme caution surrounding Occlumency. Many wizards and witches through history tried to improve themselves, as they saw it, or to enhance their cognitive abilities. Most of them met their end in asylums.

Those who didn't, however... Lily considered the benefits worth the risk.

Her own trick, which she called spatial thinking, allowed her to hold two trails of thoughts at the same time. More, it allowed her to control her hands separatly from each other, which turned a gun she carried from a purely support weapon meant to make her opponents to take cover or erect shields and give her time to prepare her next spell into a tool which she could use with great precision.

Speed was always an important and often deciding factor in fights, magical or otherwise. Magic gave its users many options, subtle and overt, but each spell required a few precious moments to cast. Moments she could fill with bullets.

The downside of it, as far as she could tell, was a possibility of developing multiple personalities disorder. The trails of thought started identical to each other, but as time passed, more and more divergences emerged as she simultaneously paid and didn't pay attention to various aspects of her surroundings and made or didn't make certain decisions. It was possible that with time a separate personality would form from those divergences.

Because of that risk, Lily used spatial thinking only in times of battle when she relied on it to survive. She always collapsed the separate thoughts into one afterwards, when she was safely away from danger. Unfortunately, the collapse caused a period of disorientation as her mind tried to deal with suddenly being two very similar yet not completely matching persons at once. Which, in turn, led to awful migraines confining her to bed for at least full twenty four hours.

She wondered if the adversary used a similar technique. That would explain his uncanny ability to survive in every - nearly every, she corrected herself, feeling a bit smug - situation. A powerful dark wizard who performed any number of rituals on himself he might have been, but magic still worked on him, as Dumbledore demonstrated in a dew of their famous duels. With the adversary's habit of leading the charge personally in any battle he considered important, it was inevitable that someone would get a drop on him, by pure luck or design.

Many tried, few lived to tell the tale.

The adversary seemingly always knew of any wands aimed at him, always had a counter ready. Spatial thinking would explain it: one trail of thought to focus on offense, another to keep track of the surroundings.

With magic you never knew for sure the specifics of such matters, of course, too many techniques allowed to achieve the same results at one price or another, but-

"Murderer," someone who wasn't supposed to be in the hotel room said, the voice unbearably close and yet distant at the same time.

Lily threw a pillow in the general direction of the voice and reached for the wand, mentally preparing herself for escape and trying not to throw up.

The pillow passed right through the intruder who, once Lily managed to focus her vision, appeared to be a ghost of a tall thin woman in once rich and fashionable, but now tattered robes stained with blood. Ghost's face was hidden behind a curtain of long hairs in a state of disarray, but Lily still vaguely recognized her as a dark witch who has found a way to produce creatures similar to dementors from the dreams of mentally ill. She tried to crave a little kingdom for herself on the American frontier. Lily has put a stop to it.

"You will pay for your crimes," the woman continued with open glee in her voice and produced a ghostly violin with most of its string cut. "I hope you'll enjoy the melody. Don't hesitate to join in with your screams."

Lily hissed again. It was one of _those_ days.


End file.
